“Normally, 3DMark are 3D-heavy, meaning that the performance effect of the GPU is much, much more apparent compared to the other system components, like CPU and RAM. This means an Core i7 6950X paired with GeForce GTX 950 will definitely give a much lower overall score compared a PC with Core i7-6700K with GeForce GTX 980 Ti. It doesn’t matter how much you push your CPU Scores by overclocking your CPU and RAM, it won’t give good scores if you have a weak GPU.”

“But there’s some scenarios where some components other than the GPU can give a small yet nice ‘boost’ to the overall scores. As a competitive overclocker who really cares about squeezing every bit of performance out of my system, I will explain how a simply optimizing RAM performance can give a little extra overall scores in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark.”